Charles Darwin: Notebooks worth millions lost for 20 years: The notebooks were last seen in November 2000 after "an internal request" to remove them from a special manuscripts storeroom to be photographed. They were taken to a temporary studio, which at the time was in a temporary building in the grounds of the university library because building ( Read more... )

Why we must resist the cult of ‘performative workaholism’.
Well, of course he's not interrogating how much this is making a virtue of necessity and being a good Boy Scout and smiling and whistling under all difficulties...
But it's not just that long hours are Bad For You, like what even business efficiency experts in the early to mid C20th were ( Read more... )

As previously mentioned, I am proposing attending a scholarly conference at the University of Notre Dame in June, and combining this with at least a brief visit to the Kinsey Institute.
I.e. Indiana.
Okay, college towns, and the Kinsey has already made a statement.
Still, we feel it might be unduly provocative to have a t-shirt made up saying ( Read more... )

I.e. science wanted religion to be okay with it.

I was given to think today that sometimes these days it seems as though religion wants to claim science.

This was underlined by a huge poster over the escalator to the Underground, which I think must have been referring on to this website - and while I know that there was a point when Islamic science ( Read more... )

It's a pity that they couldn't find someone a bit better to talk to Danielle Egan about this revelatory research on girlhood today in the Guardian Family supplement, but the piece appears to have vanished from their website so I can't link. However, there is a review of her book on the subject here, and it sound admirably All More Complicated in ( Read more... )

It's an 'Untold Story' published by a press which seems only to have produced other works by the same person (+ one on a topic related to one of his interests by someone who is presumably a mate).

No, I don't know why anyone would be sending me a flyer for their self-published work claiming that Darwin did indeed convert on his deathbed and Lady ( Read more... )

Do we actually need a census? Speaking as a historian, and someone who has extracted extremely useful information from census returns, and with the proviso, that one still has to realise that there are gaps and errors (not to mention the gross lack of checking for transcription errors in the online version), and that some of the questions on the ( Read more... )

Spotted across my reading list, a certain amount of indignation apropos of the failure of new film about Darwin to find a US distributor, because you can't really make a film about Darwin without mentioning evolution... and they fear God will smite them, or something. Or probably, more likely, nutters picket the cinemas where it's showing.

However ( Read more... )

There are things that are guaranteed to make me go huh? and this was one of them.

In New York Review of Science Fiction Jul 2009 issue, there is an article by one Stacie L. Haines, a teacher of literature (I think), who is making an argument about the worldbuilding of Pratchett's Discworld novels being 'particularly resonant with Britain in the ( Read more... )

Half of Britons do not believe in evolution, survey finds: More than one-fifth prefer creationism or intelligent design, while many others are confused about Darwin's theory. Oh duh! No, really? Because anyone who looks at the history finds that this has been the case practically ever since Darwin Did His Thing, with Lamarckianism or quasi- ( Read more... )